Burning Bright: Essays in Honour of David Bindman - Diana Dethloff

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over a long period, and the Students’ Room to host the formal presentation. To ensure the viability of the project it was essential to raise money for publication costs – not exactly crowd-funding, given our attempts at secrecy, but an appeal to friends and supporters of David to subscribe in advance. The names of donors and contributors are listed in a Tabula Gratulatoria on p. 273 and we are immensely grate- ful to them for their response to badgering emails. Special thanks are due to The Paul Mellon Centre for British Art and to The Henry Moore Foundation for their prompt and generous grants, to the Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences and the Department of History of Art at UCL (particularly Frederic Schwartz and Daniela Hernandez Tanner), and to an individual who was the very first to respond, sending a large cheque by return of post. Finally, I would like to thank my fellow Editors, Diana Dethloff, Tessa Murdoch and Kim Sloan, for inviting me to join their joyful sororial collective. celebrating david bindman [9] [ 10 ] sculpture · author Part I Sculpture Opposite: see Fig.7.3 1 Introduction: Carving a Niche in Sculptural History Tessa Murdoch The spring term of 1975 at Westfield College, West Hampstead, saw a small group of second-year undergraduates from Westfield and UCL specialising in the ‘Baroque period’ assemble for David Bindman’s class on English and French Sculpture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Günter Kowa1 and Carol Blackett-Ord (née Scott-Fox)2 were amongst them. I still have my notes from this inspiring course and the essay I wrote on the use of drawings and sketch models in English sculpture. David took us to the Foundling Hospital, St Paul’s Cathedral and Westminster Abbey to view sculpture in the context of architecture and painting. He invited the V&A curator Charles Avery to introduce the French eighteenth-century sculpture in the V&A’s Jones galleries; bronze portrait reliefs by Bouchardon of Louis XV and the Dauphin were compared with contemporary French portrait medals, extending our interest in and engagement with decorative art and our understanding of the curatorial viewpoint. David’s typed class hand-out ‘Sculptures in the V&A for spe- cial study’ singles out, under ‘French’, Houdon’s busts of Voltaire   3 and The Marquis de Miromesnil, Pigalle’s bust of J.R. Perronet, Pajou’s bust of M.J. Sedaine, Clodion’s Cupid and Pysche, Falconet’s Allegory of Sculpture and Bathing nymph and Lemoyne’s bust of The Comtesse de Feuquères, masterpieces which have all been selected for the V&A’s new European Galleries which open in December 2015.4 For English sculpture we were to focus on Delvaux’s Vertumnus and Pomona, Scheemakers’s bust of Viscount Cobham, Roubiliac’s Handel seated and busts of Jonathan Tyers and Alexander Pope, Rysbrack’s Relief of the Allegory of Charity, Wilton’s bust of Dr Cocchi, Nollekens’s Castor and Pollux and Monument to Sir John Tyrell, Thomas Banks’s Thetis dropping Achilles in the River Styx and bust of Dr Anthony Addington, Flaxman’s Michael over- 1. Günter Kowa is an art journalist and has published Grazia e delicatezza: Ein deutscher Maler in Italien: Ignaz Stens Leben und Werk, 1679 – 1748, Bonn, 1986; Architektur der Englischen Gotik, Cologne, 1990; and Kardinal Albrecht und die Renaissance in Halle, Halle, 2007. 2. Carol Blackett-Ord joined the National Portrait Gallery in 1980 and contributed as a researcher to the exhibition Handel, 1985, and jointly authored the publication F.X. Winterhalter and the Courts of Europe, 1987. From 1996, she was picture researcher for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Recent publications include with S. Turner, ‘Early mezzotints: prints published by Richard Thompson and Alexander Browne’, Walpole Society, LXX (2008); with F. Pollak, L. Wrapson, Print Quarterly: An Index 1994 – 2003, London, 2009, and ‘Shaping the master: the emergence of Donatello in nineteenth- century Britain’, Sculpture Journal, 22 (2013). 3. The Voltaire is now considered to be nineteenth century – see Alicia Robinson, ‘Houdon and Voltaire: an attribution reconsidered’, Sculpture Journal, 21 (2012), pp.97 – 103 – but the Miromesnil is a splendid example of Houdon’s portrait style. 4. For a celebration in print of these new galleries see Elizabeth Miller and Hilary Young, The Arts of Living: Europe 1600 – 1815, London, 2015. [ 12 ] coming Satan, and Coade and Sealy’s Monument to Sir William Hillman.5 ‘Terracottas and Models’ are listed with the location of the finished commission, encouraging a comparison of the preparatory model with the completed work. We examined the creative process of a sculpture; the design, often contrib- uted by an architect, the preparatory sketch, whether drawn or modelled and the intended setting.6 Studying sculpture in the round was essential to full appreciation. Writing about the marble statue of Handel for Vauxhall Gardens led to the terra- cotta model in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, and to engravings showing its original setting in those South London pleasure gardens. Contemporary responses to the sculpture were important, and Dr Matthew Maty’s poem describing a visitor’s surprise on encountering the statue of a famous contemporary composer captures that moment of recognition.7 A visit to David Garrick’s Temple to Shakespeare at Hampton led to an appreciation of the original lighting source for that statue, alas now skied in the British Library foyer, St Pancras. The intended setting for sculpture was an essential consideration; this was vital training for making future curatorial decisions when placing sculpture on exhibition. The political agenda behind contemporary patronage enriched our awareness of the historical circumstances. A sculptor’s reputation owed much to his experience through training and travel. A visit to Rome added to credentials as it demonstrated cultural enrichment and awareness of the classical past, so central to the curriculum of a patron’s education. Establishing a sculptor’s network of contacts, through his personal circumstances, membership of a church or Masonic lodge, threw light on the social and political influences on an artist’s work. David is an outstandingly gifted teacher, questioning our reactions and encour­ aging us to think and research for ourselves. Finding new evidence for attribution might result from ferreting in archives, household bills, inventories and bank accounts, talking to other scholars and curators, perusing their notes and reading contemporary accounts – David championed George Vertue’s Note Books, John Flaxman’s Lectures on Sculpture, London, 1829, J.T. Smith’s Nollekens and His Times, 1828 (1920 edition) and recommended acquiring Hugh Phillips’s remarkable study Mid-Georgian London (1964) – all sources which I still treasure and refer to regularly.8 David’s excitement when he located Mrs Esdaile’s papers for her 1928 book on Roubiliac was palpable. His own writings on sculpture set pinnacles of achievement. Julius Bryant writes In the vast and distinguished Bindman bibliography one should not under­ estimate the impact of the modest early potboilers. As a schoolboy my eyes first popped at the pages of photographs of works by Bernini, Falconet, Canova and all as illustrated in his Studio Vista pocket paperback European Sculpture from Bernini to Rodin (1970). Years later, when I told its author this, he 5. Cobham, Handel, Pope and Tyers, Rysbrack’s Allegory of Charity and Nollekens’s Castor and Pollux are in the V&A’s British Galleries, but the others are in the Hintze Sculpture Galleries. 6. John Physick, Designs for English Sculpture, 1680 – 1860, London, 1969, was an invaluable source for this quest. 7. Published in French in the Mercure de France, November 1750. Dr Maty, Under Librarian of the fledgling British Museum, presented a series of busts by Roubiliac bought at his posthumous sale; see Aileen Dawson, Portrait Sculpture: A Catalogue of the British Museum Collection c.1675 – 1975, London, 1999. 8. Hugh Phillips also left a bequest to the V&A to purchase acquisitions of eighteenth-century works of art, so his name continues to glow with gratitude on museum labels. carving a niche [ 13 ] recalled buying a pile of remaindered copies and the comforting words at the till when he explained he had written it: ‘Don’t worry mate – it ’appens to the best of ’em, even Arold Robbins.’ I regret lending a friend my copy but hope it has inspired a lifetime’s enjoy- ment. David’s jointly authored Mitchell-prize-winning book on Roubiliac and the 18th Century Monument: Sculpture as Theatre and his recent study Canova and Thorvaldsen span the last twenty years and frame a plethora of books and articles. David’s on­going editorial role for the Harvard series on the Image of the Black in Western Art and his regular teaching at Harvard lead us to anticipate yet more exciting fruit from his energetic and fertile engagement with early modern European cultural achievements. Contributors to these essays on sculpture have all benefited from working alongside David as mentor, collaborator or student. Their range of interests and influences demonstrates the wide harvest that David has reaped – belied by his affec- tionate nickname ‘Bindweed’,9 although it neatly summarises the common bond which his former students treasure and has resulted in the demonstrable commit- ment represented by this volume. The present tribute stretches geographically from California to China. It percolates through the offices of the Art Fund, the galleries of the British Museum, the libraries of the Courtauld Institute, the historic rooms and libraries of royal palaces, Tate and the V&A. Joanna Marschner, who contributes on Rysbrack’s busts for Queen Caroline’s Library at St James’s Palace, remembers: Arriving at Westfield College, as an undergraduate, in the autumn of 1976, was incredibly exciting. David Bindman was an inspiring teacher, introducing so many of the art treasures London had to offer. Later, with Professor Helen Weston, he kindly agreed to be supervisor for my PhD. I never forget our wide-ranging conversations, after which I always returned to the library or archive re-energised. We have all received generous acknowledgement where we have assisted with David’s publications and our own academic achievements have been marked by appropriate gifts. A portrait of Guillaume Coustou, under whose authority Roubiliac studied at the Academy in Paris engraved by N. de L’Armessin to mark his own reception by the Paris Academy in 1730, was the unexpected additional reward for completing my doctorate under David’s supervision. His excitement at some new find was announced with glee, and opportunities for students to acquire origi- nal drawings were generously shared. At a recent encounter in Harvard, David con- fessed to acquiring a bust by Mestrovic of Mrs Eumorfopoulos, wife of the notable collector of Oriental ceramics,10 but a frustration as to how he could display this at home. A generous proposal to lend this new acquisition to the V&A to mark the centenary of that first Mestrovic exhibition in 1915 is characteristic of David’s enthusiastic excitement in sharing the fruits of his actual or virtual hunting expedi- 9. I learnt of this in 1989 from Charlotte Gere who told me that it was much used at the British Museum, where David’s frequent presence and contributions are widely appreciated. 10. Mestrovic’s bust of George Eumorfopoulos (1863 – 1939) was given by her husband’s executors to the British Museum in 1944; Aileen Dawson, Portrait Sculpture: A Catalogue of the British Museum Collection c.1675 – 1975, London, 1999, no.30, pp.93 – 95. [ 14 ] sculpture · murdoch tions. His wide-ranging engagement with cultural exchange and cross-fertilisation between disciplines is wonderfully captured in this enduring anecdote contributed by Malcolm Baker. In 1982 David and Malcolm Baker went to Poland to give papers at a confer- ence entitled ‘Rococo Sculpture in Europe, with an Emphasis on the Lvovian School’, Malcolm speaking on Roubiliac’s European background and David on the English context of the sculptor’s work. (This was the start of their col- laboration on the book on Roubiliac’s monuments.) Taking place at a time when the communist regime was being challenged by the Solidarity move- ment, the conference was peripatetic, crossing Poland and ending up in a castle in the Tatra mountains where the lecture hall was a converted cellar. Intending to show Roubiliac’s religious qualities by accompanying the resur- rection of the body in Hargrave monument with the sounds of ‘The trum- pet shall sound!’, David had set off with a tape of the Messiah in his pocket. Unfortunately, this had been seized by Polish customs. (It was the time when the communist regime was being challenged by Solidarity and was especially wary of English art historians importing eighteenth-century sacred music.) Undeterred, David used all his considerable powers of persuasion to prompt a very nervous Malcolm to stand up at the appropriate moment and declaim the Handelian passage rather hesitantly from the audience. Fortunately, the dramatic effect of David’s performance was not entirely lost because of a poor-quality soloist. Polish and German art historians rallied and enthusi- astically sang ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth’. Shortly afterwards David turned to the theme of the English and melancholy; no sooner had he started recitin­g some lines from Young’s Night Thoughts than, just at the right time, there was a loud fluttering sound, for the recitative had awoken the bats and the German chairman had to burst in with the words, ‘Achtung! Fledermaus!’ Victoria and Albert Museum carving a niche [ 15 ] 2 Netherlandish Allegories of Madness in English Perspective Léon E. Lock In the Middle Ages, people with a mental disturbance generally remained embedded in social and family life, even if the ‘furious mad’ were usually chained and/or locked up. Hospitals could also have a separate section for those whom rela- tives were no longer able to control,1 while specialised institutions appeared only later. The oldest in Europe is Bethlem (or Bedlam) Hospital in London (general hos- pital from 1247; specialised hospital from 1357). Further foundations were established in Valencia (1409), Zaragoza (1429), Seville and Valladolid (1436). In the Northern Netherlands, the oldest madhouse was founded in 1442 at ’s-Hertogenbosch, by Reinier van Arckel, to house six inmates. Separate from the church, this asylum was run by local citizens. Then followed madhouses at Utrecht (1461) and Amsterdam (1562). Until the nineteenth century, the insane were interned without special medical treatment. Influenced by the ideas of the Enlightenment, a gradual humanisation took place. The French physician Philippe Pinel (1745 – 1826) was the first, followed by Jean-Etienne-Dominique Esquirol (1772 – 1840), to release psychiatric patients from their handcuffs and grant them a more humane treatment. This new therapy, psychological rather than physical, was geared towards teaching a rational self- disciplin­e. Pinel’s Dutch counterpart was Jacob Schroeder van der Kolk (1797 – 1862), who wanted to make his patients useful to society instead of locking them up like dangerous animals in a zoo. This new mindset produced, on 29 May 1841, the first Dutch law concerning the insane and, in 1849, the opening of the first psychiatric institute in the Netherlands, at Bloemendaal.2 The Amsterdam Dolhuis (madhouse) was founded by the city of Amsterdam with 3,000 guilders given by Hendrik Pauwelsz. Boelenssen,3 whose wife had been bitten during her pregnancy by a madwoman. Around an interior garden sur- rounded by a colonnade resembling a cloister, were organised individual cells each with a bed, a cesspit and a system of two doors to the gallery. The first of these doors, which always remained closed, was equipped with an opening the size of a It is with joy and gratitude that I recall the stimulating discussions with colleagues, particularly Karl Clausberg, Michel Maupoix, Frits Scholten, Anna Trobec and Emile van Binnebeke. All my thanks also go to my employer, the Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek Vlaanderen, which permits me to carry out this research in the Department of Architecture of the University of Leuven. 1. J.-M. Fritz, ‘Expériences médiévales de la folie: le fou aux multiples visages’, in J. Toussaint ed., Pulsion(s): Images de la folie du Moyen-Age au siècle des Lumières, Namur, 2012, pp.11 – 37, esp. p.12. 2. F.J.M. Schmidt, Entwicklung der Irrenpflege in den Niederlanden: Vom Tollhaus bis zur gesetzlich anerkannten Irrenanstalt, Herzogenrath, 1985; L. van den Berg, Rijp voor paviljoen III. Krankzinnig in Amsterdam vanaf 1565, Amsterdam, 1989. 3. M. Fokkens, Beschrijvinge der Wijdt-vermaarde Koop-stadt Amstelredam, Amsterdam, 1662, p.285. [ 16 ] head to allow the passage of food; the other was closed only when the inmate was not ‘tameable’ and became too noisy.4 Occasionally the Dolhuis was open to the public so visitors could come and admire these ‘living curiosities’ and the statue of a madwoman at the centre of the garden (Fig. 2.1). Those patients from well-to-do families who were self-funded were housed on the first floor, away from public view.5 The institution originally housed eleven inmates, the symbolic number of disciples after Judas’s betrayal. Successive extensions increased the number of indi- vidual cells to fifty-three. They were administered daily by a steward and his wife who lived on site. A doctor assisted when an inmate was injured or was ‘physically’ ill.6 In 1792 the city decided to move the insane asylum to the Buitengasthuis, located outside the city, and to demolish the Dolhuis. The Allegory of Folly, now in the Rijksmuseum (Fig. 2.1) comes from the inner garden of the Amsterdam Dolhuis.7 The statue depicts a mad- woman, naked, sitting uncomfortably on a stool-shaped trunk covered with straw, with drapery girding her loins, her right leg bent backwards. She contorts her torso to the right, her arms half outstretched while vehemently pulling her long Fig.2.1 Attributed to Artus hair upwards with her left hand and downwards with her right. Thus her arms and Quellin the Elder (Antwerp hair form a figure ‘8’ with her head placed in the middle. Her face expresses great 1609 – 68), Madness, c. 1650 – 62. Stone, height of statue fear; she screams with all her might, her mouth wide open and her tongue sticking with with pedestal 295 cm; out. The pedestal, with deep mouldings, is adorned on each side with a high relief statue 162 × 65 × 62 cm each showing an inmate looking through an opening – a peephole – just big enough (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) for the head and four fingers (Fig. 2.2a – d). The first description of the statue of the madwoman appears in 1662 in the pub- lished description of the city of Amsterdam by Melchior Fokkens: ‘inside there is a large courtyard and garden, in the middle of which is placed a statue of a naked woman on a pedestal, representing fury or madness; her hair hangs over her naked body, she pulls her hair like crazy’.8 The following year the work was illus- trated in an engraving in another guidebook, by Olfert Dapper (Fig. 2.3). The statue is clearly recognisable, as is the head in relief on the pedestal. The engraving shows that the statue occupied the centre of a garden with flower beds on one side (the other side separated by an arbour, was grassed over for bleaching linen). Dapper’s description of the statue indicates that she is crying.9 4. ‘niet te bestieren’, O. Dapper, Historische Beschryving der Stadt Amsterdam, Amsterdam, 1663, p.435. 5. C. Commelin, Beschryvinge van Amsterdam, Amsterdam, 1693, II, p.579. 6. Dapper, op. cit. (note 4), p.435. 7. Museum number BK-AM-38. 8. ‘van binnen is een groote vierkante plaats / en Tuyn / daar in’t midden op een Voetstuck een naackte Vrouwe beeldt staat / uytbeeldende de raserny of dulligheyt / ’t haar hanght heur over ’t naakte lijf / sy grijpt en treckt op’t haar als rasende’. Fokkens, op. cit. (note 3), p.285. 9.‘In’t midden van’t bloemperk wort de krankzinnigheit in steen door een stene naekte vrouw, die op een voetstal staet en als uitzinnig ’t hair by’t hooft heeft hangen, en’t selve al wenende met de handen uittrekt, uitgebeelt.’ Dapper, op. cit. (note 4), p.435. allegories of madness [ 17 ] a b c d Fig.2.2 a–d Attributed to Artus Quellin the Elder, Heads of Inmates, c.1650 – 62. Stone relief, height of pedestal 133 cm (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) There are no archival documents concerning the statue,10 or descriptions of it Fig.2.3 Anonymous from the early seventeenth century. Following a plethora of stylistic arguments initi- engraver, ‘The madhouse ated by Juliane Gabriels in 1930,11 followed by Jaap Leeuwenberg and Willy Halsema- of Amsterdam’, published in Olfert Dapper, Historische Kubes,12 Frits Scholten13 and Titia de Haseth Möller,14 the old attribution to Hendrick Beschryving der Stadt de Keyser (1565 – 1621) and his principal assistant Gerrit Lambertsz. (c.1595 – 1667), can Amsterdam, Amsterdam, be definitively ruled out. Instead, the attribution to Artus Quellin the Elder (1609 – 68) 1663. 29.6 × 42.2 cm (Léon is fully convincing, with a dating between 1650 (Quellin’s arrival in Amsterdam) and Lock) 1662 (the year of Fokkens’s publication). The contextual historical elements outlined below confirm the attribution to the most important sculptor of the Low Countries in the seventeenth century, who decorated with marble what was in the eyes of his contemporaries the eighth wonder of the world – the town hall of Amsterdam, currently a royal palace. On each of the four sides of the sculpture’s pedestal (Fig. 2.2), a vertical panel is pierced by a rectangular aperture from which heads of inmates emerge. These peephole panels refer to the interior doors of the asylum’s cells, equipped with a shutter to allow the passage of daily food rations. The heads are alternately male 10. J. Gabriëls, Artus Quellien de Oude, ‘kunstrijk belthouwer’, Antwerp, 1930, p.152, note 233. 11. J. Gabriëls, ‘“De Razernij” of “Dolhuisvrouw” van het Nederlandsch Museum’, Oudheidkundig Jaarboek, X, 1930, p. 171, and Gabriëls, op. cit. (note 10). 12. J. Leeuwenberg and W. Halsema-Kubes, Beeldhouwkunst in het Rijksmuseum, ’s-Gravenhage/ Amsterdam, 1973, no.302, pp.228 – 30. 13. F. Scholten, Artus Quellinu:. Beeldhouwer van Amsterdam, Amsterdam, 2010, pp.54 – 55. 14. T. de Haseth Möller, entry in the forthcoming catalogue of sculpture in the Rijksmuseum. allegories of madness [ 19 ] and female. Two have a calm expression, the other two shout. These four repre- sentations correspond to the building’s four wings surrounding the inner garden. The alternating heads are characteristic of the scientific classification of different types of madness, and also fit the concept of varietà dear to seventeenth-century art- ists. Two of the four psychoses represented have been identified by the psychiatrists Schmidt and Murken: the woman with loose long hair is probably suffering from hallucinatory catatonia (Fig. 2.2b);15 the man with a ribbon represents melancolia agitat­a (today identifiable with depression or neurasthenia, Fig.2.2a).16 Schmidt and Murken have also considered the representation of different types of madness, carved on a relief by Peter van Coeverden from Dordrecht of 1686, for the madhouse at ’s-Hertogenbosch, commemorating its founder Reinier van Arckel and its inauguration in 1442 (see Fig.2.7 below).17 From left to right, the six types of madness represented can be identified with the following psychoses: 18 senile dementia (e.g. Alzheimer’s disease) or alcoholic dementia (Korsakov’s disease); mania (here the fury of someone who is beating and biting himself ); imbecility (IQ between 30 and 50, with 100 being the average of the population); vital depres- sion (sadness, anxiety, alternating with mania, today described as manic depression; its representation is comparable to the head of a bearded man with a ribbon on the front of the pedestal of the Amsterdam sculpture attributed to Artus Quellin); paralytic dementia (dementia that causes partial paralysis, especially of the arms, legs and facial muscles, related to the syphilis bacterium); and acromegaly (dwarfish- ness, with non-congenital hypertrophy of the extremities and head). The hinges and locks of the doors, equipped with shutters are shown in great detail. A small ledge facilitates the delivery of food and in the opening of the main door, a food bowl is dangling from a chain. The authors of the relief at ’s-Hertogenbosch and of the pedestal reliefs in Amsterdam must have spent hours observing and drawing psychiatric phenomena in the two asylums in order to represent all these different psychoses, at that time not yet medically identified, but now recognised by psychiatrists in these detailed images. Direct observation was also practised by members of the surgeons’ guild, which included Dr Nicolaes Tulp, whom Rembrandt represented dissecting a corpse (1632, Mauritshuis, The Hague). The Amsterdam statue shows the madwoman pulling her hair vehemently and contorting her naked body in an ecstatic attitude, yelling with fear and pain. She suffers from manic delirium, which encourages her to inflict suffering on herself, here by pulling her hair. Her consciousness of self is reduced and she is prey to physical agitation and hallucinations.19 Olfert Dapper claimed in 1663 that she was also crying. This contemporary interpretation emphasises the pain she expresses, with which visitors to the Dolhuis could sympathise. Her arms and hair form an ‘8’ with her head in the middle. If we follow the curves of the ‘8’, we return to the start- 15. F.J.M. Schmidt and A.H. Murken, Die Darstellung des Geisteskranken in der bildenden Kunst: Ausgewählte Beispiele aus der europäischen Kunst mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Niederlande, Herzogenrath, 1991, p.33. 16. Ibid., p.35. 17. E. Neurdenburg, De zeventiende eeuwsche beeldhouwkunst in de Noordelijke Nederlanden: Hendrick de Keyser, Artus Quellinus, Rombout Verhulst en tijdgenoten, Amsterdam, 1948, p.100 and fig.72; A.C.M. Kappelhof, Reinier van Arkel 1442 – 1992: De geschiedenis van het oudste psychiatrische ziekenhuis van Nederland, ’s-Hertogenbosch, 1992, p.37. 18. Schmidt and Murken, op. cit. (note 15), pp.17 – 21. 19. Ibid., p. 32. [ 20 ] sculpture · lock ing point: this is the circular and obsessive nature of madness, but with a reversal Fig.2.4 Monogramist A.G. sometimes inside the circle and sometimes outside. The head is the meeting point after Caius Gabriel Cibber, of the exterior and the interior, it is the focal point which madness can neither con- Melancholy Madness, dated 1839. Lithograph, opposite trol, nor can it differentiate between the outside and inside, the true and the false. page 271 in Alexander In addition, the ‘8’ is formed not by continuous curves but by jerky movements Morison, The Physiognomy forming many diagonals in a composition reminiscent of the Rubensian tradition, of Mental Diseases, which Artus Quellin knew from his hometown. The allegory integrates a plurality London, 1843; 24.5 × 15 cm of sources to illustrate this extreme case, while going beyond these sources. Like the (Wellcome Library) four portraits of mad people on the pedestal, the statue of the madwoman is neither a traditional representation nor a simple allegory of madness. Although Artus Quellin must have spent time observing the psychosis of mania in the Dolhuis itself, it was not until the nineteenth century that the link between psychiatric conditions and the representation of expressions started to be discussed in the literature. In The Physiognomy of Mental Diseases, 1840, Alexander Morison’s descriptions are matched by lithographic illustrations. Morison (1779 – 1866), one of two senior doctors at Bethlem Hospital, London, between 1835 and 1853, followed the doctrine of physiognomy, the study of facial expression to reveal mental condi- tion.20 He describes cases from his medical experience, and concludes with an analy- sis of the two statues that crowned the gate of the Moorfields hospital, as built in 1675 to designs by the architect Robert Hooke. (Fig. 2.4). These two dramatic and monumental depictions of naked madmen, lying down and contorted, were created about 1676 by the Danish-born sculptor active in London, Caius Gabriel Cibber (1630 – 1700).21 He was the foreman of John Stone 20. A. Beveridge, ‘Richard Dadd (1817 – 1886). Sir Alexander Morison (1852), Psychiatry in pictures’, British Journal of Psychiatry, 184 (2004), 6, p.465 – a22; D. Doyle, ‘Notable fellow: Sir Alexander Morison (1779 – 1866)’, Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, 41 (2011), 4, p. 378. 21. H. Faber, Caius Gabriel Cibber 1630 – 1700: His Life and Work, Oxford, 1926, pp.42ff. Works at Bethlem Royal Hospital, today at Beckenham, near London, www.bethlemheritage.org.uk. allegories of madness [ 21 ] (1620 – 67), son of the more famous Nicholas Stone (1587 – 1647), son-in-law of the sculptor and architect Hendrick de Keyser (1565 – 1621) of Amsterdam. The figures of Raving Madness (manic) and Melancholy Madness (depressive) clearly refer to the reclining figures created by Michelangelo for the Florentine Medici tombs, but also echo the Amsterdam Dolhuis statue. Indeed, Cibber visited Amsterdam in 1660 when he accompanied his master, John Stone, who was ill, back to London. He then managed Stone’s London workshop until the master’s death in 1667, before estab- lishing his own.22 It is likely that Cibber visited the Amsterdam Dolhuis, admired the statue and observed some of the inmates. Morison described Cibber’s two statues in these words: [Raving Madness] is supposed to represent the porter of Oliver Cromwell, who, it is said, was a patient in the Bethlem Hospital of his time; it is evidently intended to give an idea of a person in a state of mania; the attitude is finely conceived, expressing, what is intended, a raving madman, and displaying great anatomical skill without individuality; the drawn in appearance of the abdomen, and the thrown back head, sinking, as it were in the trunk, are indicative of the reckless roars to which he seems giving vent.23 [Melancholy Madness] has been generally considered to be a representa- tion of Melancholy Insanity; if, however, it be attentively examined, I think it must be referred to the variety termed Dementia; that state in which the symptoms of melancholy, previously existing, have now disappeared, and deprivation of intellect and of mental energy has gradually succeeded. The extreme child-like attitude is natural, and with the tongue protruding from the mouth is characteristic of total absence of mind. The spectator is supposed to be rather under the statue, consequently looking up to it, which by giving apparent length to the face has the effect of shortening the head; this, and the open mouth, and flabby or relaxed look, convey an idea of the face being larger than it really is, and the cranium smaller, and greatly assist in carrying out the character of want of emotion.24 These descriptions are similar to the interpretation of the Amsterdam statue, though there is more latitude in psychiatric interpretation in the Cibber statues, including that of melancholy, which Schmidt and Murken prefer to interpret as a representation of imbecility. Another contemporary physician, Sir Charles Bell (1774 – 1842), records the possi- ble sources of inspiration for the representation of different types of madness, apart from direct study in asylums. In Essays on The Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression, 1824, he explains facial expressions based on musculature. His studies of emotions and their expression assisted Charles Darwin in considering the origins of the emotional life of humankind. Bell’s connection with the Royal Academy, and his ambition to become professor of anatomy there, brings him even closer to artistic practice. Bell’s analysis of Horror is illustrated by a lithograph of a man attacked by a snake that wraps around him.25 This evidently refers to the ancient Laocoön group, 22. M. Whinney, Sculpture in Britain 1530 to 1830, 2nd ed. revised by J. Physick, London, 1988, pp.79, 110. 23. A. Morison, The Physiognomy of Mental Diseases, London, 1840, p.269. 24. Ibid. p.271. 25. C. Bell, Essays on The Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression, London, 1824, pp.89 – 127. [ 22 ] sculpture · lock with its expression of fear about death. The head of the Amsterdam Dolhuis statue also shows this expression. These illustrations also closely match Charles Le Brun’s representations of acute pain and simple bodily pain, in his Expressions des Passions de l’Ame, underlining the continuity of artists’ approaches through the centuries. These citations date from a little later than the Dolhuis statue and they indicate common classical sources: the Laocoön26 and figures of the family of Niobe,27 which express extreme pain. Quellin would have been able to study these during his trip to Rome. Giambattista della Porta’s De humana physiognomonia libri IIII (1586) was probably the first Renaissance publication to restore honour to Aristotelian ideas of physiognomy, the pseudo-­ science that attempts to determine character and personality from physical evi- dence, including the face. This was developed by Sir Thomas Browne (1605 – 1682) and especially by Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741 – 1801). Ralph Dekoninck has clarified the link between ideas about the sin of idolatry and mental disorders: the idol will end insensible, motionless and silent, as if petri- fied like the idol of Psalm 115.28 Is this not the image of the statue of the madwoman, which the citizens of Amsterdam regarded as a curiosity, but also as a model not to follow? There was every reason for Amsterdam to distinguish itself from its Catholic neighbours, especially with regard to idolatry, which it fought ferociously. The fact that the madwoman exposes her naked body without too much discom- fort could associate her with the sin of lust. This sin demands punishment and con- finement, even exorcism; the moral or religious weakness of an individual attracted punishment. It is not coincidental that the Rake, the immoral son of a rich merchant illustrated in Hogarth’s print of 1735 (retouched in 1763),29 who ended up at Bethlem Hospital, is depicted as chained to the ground in the position of Cibber’s Raving Madman (Fig. 2.5), but also recalling seventeenth-century painted compositions of the Lamentation.30 All these comparisons remind us in a moralising message that mad- ness was often seen as a punishment. This was still evident in Thomas Rowlandson’s Incurables of 1789, a political caricature set at Bethlem Hospital (Fig. 2.6). The metaphor of undone hair, evidence of moral disorder in the Middle Ages (and even in the representation of Britannia on the medal added by Hogarth in his engraving of 1763), may refer to the undone spirit. This is found in the represen- tation in stained glass of the mad Mathilde of Cologne, in Holy Trinity Chapel, Canterbury Cathedral.31 Not all medieval references to madness, however, are nega- tive. Jean-Marie Fritz noted that in the Speculum Humanae Salvationis (1320), King Nebuchadnezzar prefigures Christ’s Passion, in his humiliation and suffering.32 This hairy bestial monster refers to wild men. These wear shaggy hair as an attribute, and similar hair is found on the pedestal of the statue of the Amsterdam mad- house. Such abundant hair could also symbolise the madman’s attachment to the 26. F. Haskell and N. Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500 – 1900, New Haven and London, 1981, pp.243 – 47. 27. Ibid., pp.274 – 79. 28. R. Dekoninck, ‘La folie pour l’image et pour l’art’, in J. Toussaint, ed., Pulsion(s): Images de la folie du Moyen-Age au Siècle des Lumières, Namur, 2012, pp.121 – 31. 29. D. Bindman, Hogarth and His Times: Serious Comedy, London, 1997, p.200. 30. R. Paulson, Hogarth, vol.2, High Art and Low 1732 – 1750, New Brunswick, NJ, 1992, p.21 and pls.23 – 25. 31. Bethlem Heritage, Windows onto the Past II, http://bethlemheritage.wordpress.com/2012/02/10/ windows-onto-the-past-ii/, 2012; illustrated in the stained glass inventory: http://www.therosewindow. com/pilot/Canterbury/n-2-19.htm. 32. Fritz, op. cit. (note 1), p.16 and note 10. allegories of madness [ 23 ] Fig.2.5 William Hogarth, A Rake’s Progress, plate 8 of the series, 1735/1763. Etching and engraving, 35.6 × 40.8 cm (British Museum) Fig.2.6 Thomas Rowlandson, Incurables, 1789. Drawing: pen and wash over a pencil sketch, 19.5 × 25.5 cm (Wellcome Library) world, as in medieval times.33 Fritz noted that around 1230 the traditional figure of Fig.2.7 Peter van the madman became bald or shaved, possibly repeating the ancient tradition of the Coeverden, Façade relief bald mime (mimus calvus), an iconography that recurs on both figures by Cibber at representing six madmen, 1686, Psychiatric hospital Bethlem Hospital. Reinier van Arkel, The facial expression of the Dolhuis madwoman also reminds us of Bernini’s ’s-Hertogenbosch Damned Soul. Its iconography, together with its counterpart, Blessed Soul, is based on the doctrine of the Quattuor Novissimi (death, judgement, heaven and hell),34 while reducing the whole to an antithetical representation of heaven and hell.35 Similarly, the statue of the mad woman may refer to hell, while the surrounding flowers in the garden, much as on the head of Bernini’s Blessed Soul, refer to the heavenly garden of paradise. Or, in other visual terms, the disorderly gestures of the figure and her hair, implying evil in medieval and early modern terms, contrast with the garden’s symmetrical arrangement of parterres. Between all these changing attributes, the position of the insane remains ambiguous as in medieval times, when it oscillates between the damned and the elect, between curse and blessing. In conclusion, although the Dolhuis was purpose-built, its plan, with the 1617 cloister36 and individual cells, is reminiscent of medieval monastic architecture. The large relief above the entrance porch served as a sign of the building’s purpose and encouraged passers-by to contribute to the foundation, and the cost of feed- ing of its patients. At the Reinier van Arckel asylum at ’s-Hertogenbosch (Fig. 2.7) and at London’s Bethlem Hospital the sculptural representations emphasised the harsh reality of madness. Both inspired feelings of fear and curiosity to motivate 33. Ibid., p.30. 34. See the canonical form of the Cordiale quattuor novissimorum by Gerardus de Vliederhoven. 35. S. Schütze, ‘Anima dannata’, in A. Coliva and S. Schütze, eds., Bernini scultore: la nascita del Barocco in Casa Borghese, Rome, 1998, pp.152 – 69. 36. Dating according to Dapper op. cit. (note 4), p.434. allegories of madness [ 25 ] passers-by to visit the asylum, so that their admission charge would contribute to running costs. The public was admitted during opening hours to come gekken kijken, watching the inmates, as the stewards understood that after obtaining an entry fee from the visitors, the sight of madness in flesh and blood, would invoke compas- sion, and encourage additional donations or bequests. The allegory of madness, the statue that adorned the garden of the madhouse of Amsterdam from the 1650s, complements the sculpture at ’s-Hertogenbosch and the figures from the London Bethlem Hospital. The Amsterdam statue combines medieval textual and visual sources with references to ancient Rome, prized by the new Republican Amsterdam, as well as to the contemporary sculpture of Bernini. University of Leuven [ 26 ] sculpture · lock 3 Michael Rysbrack’s Sculpture Series for Queen Caroline’s Library at St James’s Palace Joanna Marschner In January 1738 Michael Rysbrack (1693 – 1770) received a letter from Isaac Ware, Secretary to the Board of Works, requesting that he should return to the Office of Works a series of portrait busts, still incomplete, which had been commissioned by Queen Caroline of Ansbach. The sculptor was informed that he would be paid in full for the project.1 Caroline of Ansbach’s commission to Rysbrack was substantial. Had it come to fruition, it would have constituted his longest series of associated portrait busts. It would also have been the largest royal commission for sculpture in the first half of the eighteenth century. However, it was not only the project that was blown off course. The work which Rysbrack so diligently returned to the royal family would later meet a series of mishaps too. This has left the art historian with a significant task: to reconstruct the importance of the sculptural series as a whole, and to explore Caroline of Ansbach’s ambition in placing the commission. The first mention of the project is in June 1735, when The Old Whig, or the Consistent Protestant noted that ‘Her Majesty has ordered Mr Risbrack to make the Busto’s in Marble of all the Kings of England from William the Conqueror’. This account already presents something of a conundrum, as it states that the work was destined for the queen’s ‘New Building in the Gardens at Richmond’.2 In August that year the final bill was passed for the construction of Merlin’s Cave, a thatched cottage in a play- ful gothic style, one of a series of pavilions and garden structures that punctuated the walks through the park surrounding Richmond Lodge, the rural retreat used by George II and Queen Caroline.3 Merlin’s Cave, together with the Hermitage, another of the little buildings, and indeed the garden itself, the brain child of Caroline, was invested with a political message. Merlin’s Cave was populated with life-sized waxworks – representing the characters associated with Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, with its celebration of the Tudor dynasty. The figure of Merlin was set at the heart of the piece, which also included figures of Queen Elizabeth I and her mythical embodiment, Britomart.4 The ensemble spoke of the ancient origins I would like to thank HM The Queen for graciously allowing me access to works of art in the Royal Collection and to consult the Royal Archives. I am very grateful to Jonathan Marsden, Director of the Royal Collection Trust, and Kathryn Jones, Beth Clackett, Hannah Walton and Shruti Patel from the Royal Collection Trust teams for their help in the preparation of this essay. 1. London, The National Archives (thereafter cited as TNA), Works 1/2, p.7. 23 Jan. 1737 – 8. TNA, Works 4/7, 11 Jan. 1737 – 8. 2. The Old Whig, or The Consistent Protestant, Issue 16, 26 June 1735. 3. TNA, Works 4/6, 1 August 1735. 4. An alternative reading of the inspiration behind the programme of Merlin’s Cave is based on Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso in which Merlin’s prophecies are for glory for the House of Este, from which the House of Hanover claimed origin. [ 27 ] of British monarchy and set up a comparison between the Tudors, whose regime saw a renaissance for England in the sixteenth century, and the new Hanoverian dynasty. It is just possible that the first idea was that busts of the kings of England might com- plete the scheme. A drawing by William Kent of a section through the Cave shows that bookshelves provided for the naive poet Stephen Duck, its hermit-interpreter, were topped with sculpture. However, space in the Cave was very limited.5 The wax- works were ridiculed by visitors and in the contemporary press. It is no surprise to find that Rysbrack’s distinguished series would be destined for another location.6 In about 1735, Caroline decided to build a new library to house her books. These had previously been stored in repositories scattered through the royal homes, includ- ing in an apartment she had recently offered to clear to provide accommodation for her husband’s new mistress, Amelia Sophia de Walmoden. The library would be located in the stable yard at the western side of St James’s Palace. Her architect of choice was William Kent. He designed a single-storey building 60 feet long by 30 feet wide, with a deeply coved ceiling. Five arched windows on the long west wall, look- ing out over Green Park, were balanced with five arched recesses on the east. With the central recess forming the main entrance into the space, those flanking it were filled with bookshelves.7 Additional shelves projected from the walls at right angles between the bays. There was a chimneypiece at each end of the room. Eventually brackets to support sculpture were included at a high level between the bays, over the chimneypiece and on the mantelshelf. It was there that Rysbrack’s busts were to go. Queen Caroline seems to have taken an interest not only in the message of Rysbrack’s sculptural programme but in its preparation too. She visited his studio in 1735, where she saw not just the busts in progress but also the monumental equestrian portrait of William III destined for Queen’s Square, Bristol.8 She was not, however, to see her project complete. In November 1737, she was taken ill in her library, and died eleven days later, leaving its furnishing unfinished. In 1738 Rysbrack complied with the request to return ‘the modellos of the faces you made for working after’ – a spectacular series of terracotta busts each about 60 cm tall. Whether these were ever intended to be recreated in marble is not known. However, marble busts of George II and Caroline dated 1738 and 1739 respectively, which eventually sat on the mantelshelves at either end of the library, do have terra­ cotta versions.9 A watercolour (Fig. 3.1), and an associated pencil drawing, made by Charles Wild of the library, in about 1815, show that the terracotta busts were installed on the high-level brackets around the room.10 The impact of Caroline’s unexpected death rumbled on. Despite some additions being made to the book collection during George II’s lifetime, the speed of growth 5. British Library (hereafter cited as BL), ‘The Section of Merlin’s Cave in the Royal Gardens at Richmond’ by William Kent, Some Designs by Mr Inigo Jones and Mr Wm Kent, London, 1744. 6. There is reference to Michael Rysbrack making sculptures after the seasons for Merlin’s Cave. The Daily Gazetteer (London edition), 3 July 1736. 7. Sir John Soane’s Museum, Designs for Queen Caroline’s Library. Accession numbers, vol.147/192, 193, 195, 196, 198. 8. Daily Journal, 11 June 1735. General Evening Post, 10 – 12 June 1735. George Vertue, Note Books, 6 vols, Walpole Society, London 1930 – 47. III (1934), p.75. 9. Marble busts, royal collection inventory number (hereafter RCIN) 31322, and RCIN 31317. Terracotta versions of the busts (RCIN 1412 and RCIN 1411) were acquired by Queen Mary in 1932 from the collection of Lord Hatherton. Another copy of the terracotta bust of Queen Caroline is in the Koninklijk Huisarchief, The Hague, The Netherlands. 10. Watercolour, RCIN 922168. Drawing, City of Westminster Archives, London. [ 28 ] sculpture · marschner dwindled dramatically. Under George III the space was denuded, as fine furni- Fig.3.1 Charles Wild, ture was retrieved to help fit out the library William Chambers was constructing Queen Caroline’s Library, in the Queen’s House, later Buckingham Palace. By the early nineteenth century St James’s Palace, c.1815. Watercolour, 20 × 25.1 cm there are references to Kent’s beautiful building being little more than a ‘lumber (The Royal Collection) room’.11 Despite a final flourish, when it was used to house the book collection of Frederick, Duke of York and Albany, it was demolished in 1825. The sculpture was moved initially to the Orangery at Windsor Castle. By the third quarter of the nine- teenth century the bust of Queen Elizabeth I had been built into the chimneypiece of Windsor’s new royal library, and those of Edward, the Black Prince and King Edward VI set in niches in the Grand Vestibule there. The remaining majority had been placed in store, where in 1906 the shelf on which they were stored collapsed. The damage was catastrophic, and only the fragments of one bust were deemed salvageable. However, despite their disastrous history, it is possible to assemble more infor- mation about Rysbrack’s line of kings and queens for Queen Caroline. The busts of Elizabeth I, Edward, the Black Prince and Edward VI have now been retrieved from their architectural settings and can be appraised as works in their own right.12 The badly damaged bust of Elizabeth of York is carefully preserved in store. She has lost her nose, and much of the back of her head and right shoulder.13 In the Royal Collection Trust’s Photograph Collection there are four glass negatives made 11. Thomas Pennant, Some Account of London, London, 1805, p.118. 12. Elizabeth I, RCIN 45101. Edward, the Black Prince, RCIN 37067. Edward VI, RCIN 53346. The busts of the Black Prince and Edward VI are discussed in Desmond Shawe-Taylor, ed., The First Georges: Art and Monarchy 1714 – 1761, The Royal Collection Trust, 2014, pp.284 – 85. 13. RCIN 31667. rysbrack’s sculpture for queen caroline’s library [ 29 ] Fig.3.2 J.F. Livingstone, by J.F. Livingstone in about 1872, each recording a pair of busts – Edward III and Elizabeth of York, portrait Philippa of Hainault; Edward, the Black Prince, with Edward VI; Elizabeth of York bust, Michael Rysbrack, (Fig. 3.2) with Henry V (Fig. 3.3); and Henry, Prince of Wales, with Catherine of 1737 – 38. Photograph, c.1872 (The Royal Collection) Valois.14 This was part of a photographic record commissioned on behalf of Queen Victoria of room arrangements at Windsor and individual artefacts there, part of a programme of numbering and listing the works. By 1874 photographs made from the surviving negatives of the busts, together with three additional photographs for which the negatives must now be lost, were included in the ‘Windsor Castle Inventory of Statuary, Busts &c.’.15 This was one of a series of inventories made at the time, which also include bronzes, clocks and candelabra, pictures, porcelain and arms and armour. The inventory of statuary indicates that at this date there had been eleven busts surviving – the last two subjects were King Alfred the Great and Henry VII. Given that Kent’s library building was constructed with such an eye to symme- try, it is perhaps surprising to find an uneven number of busts. Interestingly George Vertue, describing Caroline’s visit to the sculptor’s studio, records her comment on seeing a bust in preparation of King James I. The Queen was not impressed, stating, ‘Il me semble a une boureau. I won’t have it done.’16 Perhaps this may have been part 14. Negative numbers 2400578, 2400579, 2400580, 2400581. 15. RCIN 1101202. 16. ‘He looks like a scoundrel to me. I won’t have it done’, Vertue, op. cit., note 8, III (1934), p.75. [ 30 ] sculpture · marschner of the series, but whether the subject was dropped or, if the design was amended, Fig.3.3 J.F. Livingstone, the piece made, delivered, but later destroyed, is now impossible to establish. In Henry V, portrait bust, Charles Wild’s illustrations of the room it is possible to make out the identity of Michael Rysbrack. 1737 – 38. Photograph, c.1872 several of the busts in situ, but the image does not show the space in its entirety. (The Royal Collection) As inspiration for those using her library, Caroline made a hall of ancestors, selecting monarchs for their contribution to the construction of the rights and liber- ties of the nation. In contrast to the waxworks programme of Merlin’s Cave, not only was this conceived in a more conventional medium but the history of each subject was well established. Edward III, Edward, the Black Prince, and Henry V had established places in the Valhalla of royal British heroes, famed for their valour, defending the honour of the nation at Crécy and Agincourt respectively. Caroline’s choice would have been reinforced by the knowledge that they had been venerated by generations of her royal ancestors, and it may have helped that they had trounced the French – despite the fact since 1713 there had been an Anglo-French rapprochement, relations with the old enemy remained uneasy. Caroline’s decision to include King Alfred in the series comes as no surprise. Since her arrival in London in 1714, she would have been aware of the Whig party’s promotion of Alfred as a perfect monarch, famed for his wisdom and sense of jus- tice. His role in the unification of the ancient kingdoms of Britain, described in editions of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum and Assar’s Life of King Alfred, rysbrack’s sculpture for queen caroline’s library [ 31 ] Fig.3.4 J.F. Livingstone, both published in 1722, was in line with a growing awareness of a ‘British’ national Henry VII, portrait bust by identity, which followed the Act of Union with Scotland in 1707.17 The catalogue Michael Rysbrack, 1737 – 38. of Caroline’s library shows she had a healthy number of books concerning this Photograph, c.1872 (The Royal Collection) subject.18 Caroline’s veneration of the Tudor dynasty is apparent in many aspects of her patronage and she sought to draw parallels between the new Hanoverian family and these romantic ancestors under whom the country had prospered. Henry VII (Fig. 3.4) and Elizabeth of York take their place as the founders of the house, Edward VI and Elizabeth I as their starry Protestant successors. It is hard to position Henry, Prince of Wales, in the series. Certainly, he was a great patron of artists, a role to which Caroline aspired too. However, it is possible that this is another instance where another earlier dynasty is celebrated. The presence of Prince Henry in conjunction with the mysterious bust of his father, James I, perhaps honours members of the House of Stuart, who brought with them the throne of Scotland. The inclusion of the last two women, Philippa of Hainault, wife of Edward III, and Catherine of Valois, wife of Henry V, is more unusual – spouses were not included as standard through the series. It is interesting to discover, though, that, 17. The Venerable Bede, Historiae Ecclesiasticae Gentis Anglorum, ed. J. Smith, Cambridge, 1722. Annales Rerum Gestarum Aelfredi Magni: Auctore Asserio Menevensi, ed. F. Wise, Oxford, 1722. 18. Sir John Spelman, Life of Alfred the Great, London, 1709. Sir Richard Blackmore, Alfred: An Heroic Poem in Twelve Books, London, 1723. [ 32 ] sculpture · marschner in histories prepared in the early eighteenth century, stories of the deeds of both Philippa and Catherine were included. Philippa was said to have raised an army of twelve thousand men, while her husband was in France, in order to defend the English against the Scots. Catherine, following the death of Henry V, had married Owen Tudor, and thereby became a pivotal figure, linking the House of Lancaster with that of Tudor. A study of the sources used by Rysbrack as inspiration for the busts reveals yet another dimension to Caroline’s scheme. The models selected for the majority of the busts were from works of art in the royal collection, which in several instances had been acquired by Caroline herself. While it may seem obvious that royal por- traits would be located most frequently in the royal art collection, the dispersal of a great part of this in government sales in 1647, following the execution of Charles I, had left many gaps. Significant royal pieces had been acquired subsequently by others; James II had acquired one hundred and ten paintings by Jacob de Wet of Scottish monarchs for the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh. However, in London, Caroline, when establishing the extent of the holdings on the accession in 1727, would have been unable to put together either a painted or a sculptural series of dynastic portraits of any great antiquity.19 In order to remedy this, with respect to paintings, according to the Reverend James Grainger, she ‘begged’ Lord Cornwallis of Eye to sell her fifteen late sixteenth-century copies of royal portraits, painted on panel, from his family collection, representing many generations of monarchs, from Edward III to Mary Tudor.20 These paintings, along with others she had bought individually, were drawn together with the historic royal collection survivors, princi- pally at Kensington Palace in both the state and private apartments. Even though Rysbrack had visited Kensington, and probably other royal homes too, his information did not come directly from the works, but though the engraved portraits, made after the royal collection examples by George Vertue.21 From 1728, George Vertue, historian, artist and printmaker, made numerous visits to the royal palaces, especially to Kensington, hunting for ‘pictures [which] are most useful for me to work after’. He claimed that, at Kensington by about 1734, he had been able to locate images of every monarch from Henry IV to Charles II, as well as ‘a Duke of Gloucester and Lord Guildford’.22 The results of his endeavours were published as two sets of engravings to illus- trate Salmon’s The Chronological Historian and Paul Rapin’s History of England, pub- lished first in Paris in 1733, and later, in 1736, by Nicholas Tindal in London, as The Heads of the Kings of England Proper for Mr Rapin’s History. A note about the source of the image is frequently engraved in the plate. Caroline’s library contained a publica- tion listed as Heads of King’s and Queen’s of England, which is very likely to be one or other of the editions of these works. 19. Just four portraits, those of Henry VI, Edward IV, Richard III and Elizabeth Woodville, had survived from a series commissioned by either Henry VII or Henry VIII some time between 1504 and 1520. 20. The collection included: RCIN 403045, RCIN 404196, RCIN 404734, RCIN 404740, RCIN 404744, RCIN 404745, RCIN 404748. 21. Rysbrack had provided a marble relief, The Roman Marriage, for the chimneypiece in the Cupola Room in Kensington Palace in 1723. In March 1727 Rysbrack had been granted permission to make copies of Camillo Rusconi’s Four Boys, part of the decoration of the King’s Gallery at Kensington Palace. TNA, LC5/158, p.492, and TNA, LC5/159, p.1. 22. Vertue, op. cit. (note 8), IV (1936), p.65. rysbrack’s sculpture for queen caroline’s library [ 33 ] Rysbrack based the design of his busts of King Alfred, Edward III, Edward, the Black Prince, Henry V, Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, Edward VI, Henry, Prince of Wales, and possibly Catherine of Valois too, on Vertue’s engraved portraits. In the case of Henry V and Edward VI, these are evidently taken from the respec- tive images in the painted panel-portrait series that Caroline had recently acquired from Lord Cornwallis, and, indeed, Vertue notes in the plate that they were hanging at Kensington Palace.23 Edward III is based on another of the panel paintings, but this one, Vertue suggests, was hanging at Windsor Castle. The source for the busts of both Henry VII and Elizabeth of York is Remigius van Leemput’s small ver- sion, painted on canvas in 1667, of Hans Holbein’s life-sized mural of the family of Henry VIII, painted in 1537 for the Privy Chamber at Whitehall Palace. The mural had been lost in the Whitehall fire of 1698, but van Leemput’s little copy had been inherited by Caroline from the historic royal collection, and hung in the private apartments at Kensington, according to Henry Lowman’s inventory of the collec- tions there made in about 1732.24 Vertue’s own note is that his source was ‘an original in oil colours in the Royal Collection’. As sources for other engravings, which subsequently provided inspiration for Rysbrack, Vertue looked further afield. The engraving of King Alfred was made after a panel painting, dating probably from the early seventeenth century, which had been purchased by University College, Oxford, in 1661 – 62, and became thereafter a standard image. Edward, the Black Prince, was based on his effigy in Canterbury Cathedral. Henry, Prince of Wales, was based on a miniature after Isaac Oliver in the collection of Dr Richard Mead. Locating a source for the bust of Catherine of Valois is not easy, but again it is probably Vertue who provided Rysbrack with the key. The Queen is depicted wearing a fashionable French round hood, and a gown that resembles that worn by Mary Tudor, Queen of France, painted by François Clouet, in about 1515, at the time of her second marriage to Charles Brandon, First Earl of Suffolk. A copy of this portrait was in the possession of John Carteret, Lord Granville, who courted Caroline’s favour over discussions about art and literature. The compiler of one of Kensington’s inventories notes the similarities between Lord Granville’s picture and another in the royal collection, suggesting that it had been brought to the palace for inspection, just as others had been brought to delight the Queen.25 Vertue made an engraving of the painting, and with its French style of dress, it is possible this was used, as the most appropriate source available.26 However, Rysbrack also undertook his own research. His bust of Philippa of Hainault was made after a painting by Thomas Murray, completed in 1710 for Queen’s College, Oxford; Philippa was founder of the college. Elizabeth I was not only based on her effigy made in 1603 by Maximilian Colt, and her wax portrait part 23. The painting of Edward VI (RCIN 404747) is depicted in a watercolour (RCIN 922153) by James Stephanoff as still hanging on the south wall of the Old Drawing Room in Kensington Palace in about 1815. 24. Remigius van Leemput, RCIN 405750. ‘A Catalogue taken of the Pictures which are in the Publick and Private Lodgings of the Palace of Kensington’, Henry Lowman, about 1723, Office of the Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, York House, St James’s Palace. 25. William Bathoe, A Catalogue of Pictures Belonging to King James the Second (Copied from a ms. In the Library of the Earl of Oxford): To which is Appended a Catalogue of the Pictures, Drawings, Limnings, Enamels, Models in Wax and the Ivory Carvings etc. at Kensington Palace in Queen Caroline’s Closet, next the State Bedchamber, London, 1758. 26. William Kent depicts Catherine of Valois wearing a round French hood in his painting of The Meeting of Henry V and the Queen of France made for Queen Caroline in 1730 – 31. [ 34 ] sculpture · marschner of the ‘Ragged Regiment’ collection, both in Westminster Abbey, but also shows hints of the Ditchley portrait of the Queen, to which he may have been given access through his friend and colleague, the architect James Gibbs. Most important of all, Rysbrack gave each of the busts a vivacity that transcended any engraved or painted source. In the case of the busts that drew on funeral effigies, his subjects are rendered to show all the stateliness and energy of these monarchs in their prime. Rysbrack’s busts made for Caroline should have provided the royal collection with its first coherent line of kings in sculptural form. For her library, arguably Britain’s first ‘Universal’ library, they would have served as a decoration to give distinction to Kent’s fine room, and a fitting message and inspiration for its potential function as a place of study and debate. Historic Royal Palaces rysbrack’s sculpture for queen caroline’s library [ 35 ] Fig.4.1 Attributed to John Thomas Smith, Hogarth Sitting to Roubiliac for his Bust, about 1820 – 30. Pen and sepia wash, 18.3 × 13.7 cm (Yale Center for British Art, New Haven; Paul Mellon Collection) 4 Roubiliac’s Hogarth and the Playful Portrait Bust Malcolm Baker Long after the deaths of both Roubiliac and Hogarth, the painter was repre- sented sitting to the sculptor in an encounter which, though fictitious, celebrates the well-documented friendship between the two artists (Fig. 4.1). Attributed to J.T. Smith, the biographer of Nollekens, Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, and son of Nathaniel Smith who had worked in Roubiliac’s studio, this pen and wash drawing may be fanciful but has some features – the shelf sup- porting what are recognisably specific busts by Roubiliac – which appear to draw on a distant memory of the sculptor’s workshop.1 Certainly, the way in which the bust of Hogarth already sits on its socle, as well as the fact that the socle is of a familiar Roubiliac pattern rather than the distinctive one seen with the surviving terracotta (Fig. 4.3), is an anomaly, just as the motif of Hogarth sitting at a table drinking is an anachronistic if charming invention. None the less, the wit of this image, with Hogarth’s dog Trump being represented not as a live animal but instead in the form of the model (complete with base) made by Roubiliac, rings true. Roubiliac’s bust of Hogarth is here used as a focus for an imagined session between two friends with similar artistic values, not least a shared predilection for visual play. Playing with the viewer’s sense of what is real and what is fictive, and by this means engaging the viewer in the very process of perception, is central to many of Hogarth’s compositions. The Conquest of Mexico, for instance, leaves ambiguous the division between the space in which the drama is enacted and that occupied by the audience, just as we are left wondering whether the relief below the bust on the chimneypiece is painted or sculpted. Nowhere is this delight in visual ambiguity more apparent than in his Self-Portrait with Pug (Fig. 4.2).2 Here the conceit of the In acknowledgment of David Bindman’s major contributions to the study of both Hogarth and Roubiliac and of his own great capacity for friendship, an essay on the friendship between the two artists seems appropriate, even though I am aware that it will probably prompt a sceptical and robustly Hogarthian guffaw. 1. Yale Center for British Art B.1975.3.806, published in K. Junod, Writing the Lives of Painters: Biography and Artistic Identity in Britain, 1760 – 1810, Oxford, 2011, pl.22, p.147. The busts on the shelf include images which may be identified as models or casts of Roubiliac’s Martin Folkes, Charles II, Isaac Barrow, Shakespeare, all of which were among the busts purchased for the British Museum by Matthew Maty at the sculptor’s posthumous sale in 1762. These were well known to J.T. Smith, who in 1817 (as Aileen Dawson has noted) reported to the Trustees that the busts had been moved ‘from a dark room where they were difficult to be seen’ to the Print Room where they made ‘a most respectable appearance’. (See A. Dawson, Portrait Sculpture: A Catalogue of the British Museum Collection c.1675 – 1975, London, 1999, p.10.) Smith’s image seems to bring together the British Museum’s busts with Samuel Ireland’s image of Roubiliac’s terracottas of Hogarth and Trump discussed below. Also included, as Adam White has pointed out to me, is a reversed image of Michelangelo’s Moses, presumably taken from a print such as either that by Jacob Matham c.1600 or that in Jan de Bisscchop’s Paragdimata, 1672 – 89. 2. The literature on this portrait and Hogarth’s engraving of it is vast but key contributions include D. Bindman, Hogarth, London, 1981, p.151; E. Einberg and J. Egerton, The Age of Hogarth: British Painters [ 37 ] painting within a painting is complicated still further by the greater prominence given to the pug dog than to Hogarth’s own image and the way in which the diag­ onal line of green curtain in front of the canvas at top right seems to be continued by the edge of red drapery running across the painter’s chest inside the painted image of him. Such ambiguities, as well as the conceit of images within images, are, however, also found in Roubiliac’s work. Many of his more ambitious monuments engage the viewer by involving the juxtaposition of different representational regis- ters, so that the eye has to move, as on the Duke of Montagu’s monument, between the sculptural representation of a (then) living person (the Duchess) to an allegorical figure (Charity) who is shown placing a sculptural image of the deceased Duke on a fictive architectural structure which is itself contained within (and framed by) the larger structure of the monument. A similar play between the seemingly real, fictive and allegorical is made by the different figurative elements of the Warren monu- ment – the bust of Warren, Hercules and Warren’s widow in the guise of Britannia or Navigation – where the conceit of a sculpture within a sculpture is likewise played out.3 In these different ways, visual play and a wit that challenges and engages the viewer through a perceptual game are characteristic of both artists’ work. But how can a bust involve wit and visual play? Seemingly conventional, tradi- tional and formal as a genre, the bust had associations that were aristocratic and above all public. As Byron was to put it, ‘a bust looks like putting up pretensions to permanency – and smacks something of a hankering for public fame rather than pri- vate remembrance’.4 But during the eighteenth century in both Britain and France the conventions of the genre could be employed in what might be described as a spirit of inventive play.5 This seems to have assumed a knowing awareness on the viewer’s part of the artificiality of the bust form. In the hands of the most accom- plished sculptors – Roubiliac, Pigalle or Houdon, for instance – the virtuosity of carved surfaces is used to create seemingly momentary effects of great brilliance. Yet, at the same time, while the viewer is entranced by this consummate illusionism, the way in which the material is worked leaves no doubt that this is a carved (or, in the case of terracotta, modelled) artefact. The pleasure of viewing such images is to be found in the way that they oscillate between the illusionistic and the material, so engaging us, and presumably eighteenth-century viewers too, in a perceptual game. One aspect of this game was the possibility it opened up for both sculptor and spec- tator to play with the bust’s conventions, including features such as the truncation and the socle. Lemoyne’s celebrated bust of Coypel, for example, takes the drapery that would have masked the bust’s truncation and brings it down around the socle, so boldly denying the distinction between bust and socle and in the process chal- lenging the bust’s conventions and the viewer’s expectations. A similar device is Born 1675 – 1709 (Tate Gallery Collections, II), London, 1988, pp.110 – 15; R. Paulson, Hogarth’s Graphic Works, 3rd ed., London, 1989, cat. no.181; R. Paulson, Hogarth, New Brunswick, NJ, 1992, vol.II, p.260; D. Bindman, Hogarth and His Times: Serious Comedy, London, 1997, p.83; M. Hallett, Hogarth, London, 2000, p.164; R. Simon, Hogarth, France and British Art, London, 2007, pp.125 – 26, 159, 174 – 75. 3. For these two monuments and others, such as that to Viscount Shannon and the model for the Shelburne monument, see D. Bindman and M. Baker, Roubiliac and the Eighteenth-Century Monument: Sculpture as Theatre, New Haven and London, 1995. 4. For Byron’s remarks see Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. L. Marchand, vol.ix, London, 1979, pp.20  – 21. 5. For a fuller discussion see M. Baker, The Marble Index: Roubiliac and Sculptural Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century Britain, New Haven and London, 2015, chapter 3. [ 38 ] sculpture · baker employed by Pigalle in his bust of Lemoyne himself.6 Rather later Houdon was to Fig.4.2 William Hogarth, use the same motif quite frequently in his images of both male and female sitters Self-Portrait of the Painter but, interestingly, the early examples are found on busts representing fellow art- and his Pug, 1745. Oil on canvas, 90.0 × 69.9 cm ists – a category of portrait bust to which Roubiliac’s terracotta of Hogarth (Fig. 4.3) (Tate) belongs.7 One of the most striking features of Roubiliac’s bust is the pronounced turn of the head, giving the image an air of vigour, energy and even pugnacity, the last being a telling term in view of what follows. It is in part because of this that com- mentators have seen the bust – already described by Vertue in 1741 as ‘very like’ and by Nichols in 1781 as ‘a strong resemblance’ – a vivid representation of Hogarth’s 6. For Lemoyne’s Coypel see M. Baker: ‘“A Sort of Corporate Company”: approaching the portrait bust in its setting’, in P. Curtis, P. Funnell and N. Kalinsky, eds., Return to Life: A New Look at the Portrait Bust, exh. cat., Leeds (Henry Moore Institute), 2001, pp.30 – 31; and for Pigalle’s Lemoyne see J.D. Draper and G. Scherf, Pajou. Sculpteur du Roi 1730 – 1809, exh. cat., Paris (Musée du Louvre), 1998, pp.68 – 69. 7. For Roubiliac’s bust of Hogarth see J. Kerslake, Early Georgian Portraits, National Portrait Gallery, London, 1977, vol.I, pp.143 – 44. The material is given here as terracotta although notes by conservators in the NPG’s files indicate that the socle is either wholly or in part of plaster. hogarth’s roubiliac [ 39 ]